About the Editor

Roberto has over 25 years experience in the IT field, and has spent the last 12 years working in the intersection of open source software and business development. Roberto has taken an active interest in different open source projects and organizations, he has served on advisory boards, and helped large IT vendors, open source vendors and customers to design and deploy their open source strategies. After serving as Senior Director of Business Development at SourceForge for over 4 years, in 2016 he started a new company called Business Follows, whose mission is to is to help developers, companies and organizations to make Open Source development a key part of their business strategies. He is the editor of commercial open source blog.

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File Format War: Microsoft spokesman answers some issues

Ten days ago OOXML vote in ISO/IEC JTC1 failed, as results clearly by the official ISO announcement.

Approval requires at least 2/3 (i.e. 66.66 %) of the votes cast by national bodies participating in ISO/IEC JTC 1 to be positive; and no more than 1/4 (i.e. 25 %) of the total number of national body votes cast negative. Neither of these criteria were achieved, with 53 % of votes cast by national bodies participating in ISO/IEC JTC 1 being positive and 26 % of national votes cast being negative.

Since this vote is not the end of the process, that will go until February when another JTC-1 meeting in Geneva will take place, I posed some questions to Andrea Valboni, Italian Microsoft’s CTO (read the disclosure).

Despite many O countries voted yes, only half of P members were favorable, why that in your opinion?

The fast track process for DIS29500 [name for ECMA OpenXML] has catalyzed the interest of many NBs around the world, and this is a counter-proof of the importance that many countries sees in this fact. As a consequence the debate around this technical specification has been very healthy and the numbers of countries participating to the five months discussion has been fairly higher with respect to the approval of ISO26300. As expected, P members has been affected by an intense lobbying activity by both sides and some of them felt that the only way to have their technical comments being considered by ISO was to express a “conditional approval”, which means a disapprove vote that could change to an approve if the issues reported as comments will be addressed.

Passing from 30 full voting members to 41 in six months could be a sign of democracy in action, but participating ISO processes it is far to be open, since you have to pay about 2000 euros.

As Kretchmer clearly stated years ago, among the ten requirements that enable Open Standards Open Meeting is the first of the list. But the very first barrier for stakeholders to participation in the standardization process is just the economic one. Paying to become a member IS a barrier.

About “the right” to stack a committee, while I have not been asked by Microsoft to join the ISO/IEC JTC1, I have been contacted by representatives of the opponent tribe who kindly offered me to pay my fee.

That vote was marred by accusations in many countries around the world of overly aggressive conduct upon the part of Microsoft alleges, but has not substantiated, similar charges against opponents of OOXML.

I believe that sooner or later similar charges against opponents will come out.

The OOXML format contains significant design flaws [and it will be difficult to correct them] other than by starting again from scratch, or by enriching the already existing standard, Open Document Format.

Do you think that Microsoft would be able to propose modifications at the next ballot resolution meeting to make national bodies wish to withdraw their negative votes?

Standards exists in ISO addressing the same topic area, like networking or multimedia representation, all of them come from a different story and user requirements. The same applies to document’s representation, where ISO26300 coexists with ISO19005 (PDF/A) and DIS 29500 is just a different way to represent unstructured information, which reflect a different perspective on how information can be handled. Is it technically better than ISO26300? It is difficult to judge, only time can prove this and ISVs acceptance. We never criticized ISO26300 for technical imperfections; there are, of course, as in any technical specification, but this is not the main point: the two are just different. ECMA TC45 who worked on OOXML contributed significantly in improving the technical specifications, with about additional 2000 pages which added to the original 4000; we think the work of those people, coming from 12 different companies, should be respected and not simply stamp it as “significantly flawed”. The increasing numbers of developers and companies who are building solutions on this technical spec demonstrate that the standard is usable and not that flowed.
As part of ECMA, Microsoft will provide its support in addressing the technical comments presented by different countries, but is ultimately ECMA job to provide satisfactory proposals to resolve objections. As far as our role in the national organization, UNINFO, we agreed on the proposal presented by Leonardo Chiariglione during the discussion period, to support the development of a reference implementation and testing procedures for DIS29500, to be released according to an open source model, in order to facilitate the adoption of the standard. This proposal is attached as a comment to the Italian voting position and we confirm our commitment in supporting this proposal within the ISO organization.

Full disclosure.In different time, I had some collaboration with Microsoft, since they need to better understand the free software principles and the business model and to validate their thoughts on how to find ways to cooperate with the free and open source world on interoperability, licensing schemas and possibly joint initiatives.

[…] Brian Vuyk wrote;Since this vote is not the end of the process, that will go until February when another JTC-1 meeting in Geneva will take place, I posed some questions to Andrea Valboni, Italian Microsoft’s CTO (read the disclosure). … […]

[…] toddbishop@seattlepi.com (Todd Bishop) wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptSince this vote is not the end of the process, that will go until February when another JTC-1 meeting in Geneva will take place, I posed some questions to Andrea Valboni, Italian Microsoft’s CTO (read the disclosure). … […]

I believe that sooner or later similar charges against opponents will come out.

I’m not sure that’s the point though, Roberto. In my experience of various standards bodies, paying for experts to be involved is relatively normal. I’m sure we’ll find that various companies engaged various others to represent them or at least to participate from previously known positions.

The issue with the recent OOXML vote was less that people were recruited to the committees and more the numbers in which they were recruited. The recruitment may have been both within the rules and part of normal practice. But the scale of the recruitment was not.

you are raising a very important issue, I believe. This time, much more than other times were the general public was less interested or aware on the subject, we saw an amazing lobbying activity. Despite I am a fan of ODF, I think it is fair to let people know that JTC1 commissions were under a simultaneous bilateral attack.

Talking about real problems, I am afraid that ISO is publicly showing its limits. I really hope that all this will help us to get ISO’s participation and decision processes more similar to IETF.

Even if the “opponent tribe” was found to have used similar lobbying efforts, how does that make Microsoft’s actions any more positive? Also, why haven’t we heard about these lobbying efforts by now? I think that IBM, Sun and others definitely lobbied hard for ODF, but not using the underhanded tactics of stacking votes and buying support. There’s a difference.

what I am pointing out here is that both sides managed to fool ISO, and it is not a big deal. ODF didn’t require a strong lobby activity as far as I know, and in this respect there is a difference, I agree.

If you didn’t heard about opponents lobbying efforts I would suggest you to check out how many members get at the very end of the process in Italy, and how did they vote. Enlightening.